The Modigliani controversy – the break with Keynesian thinking

I have been continuing the research for my next book (hopefully to be finished by May 2016) on the way in which the neo-liberals convinced policy makers including those in progressive social democratic political parties that the globalisation of finance and capital flows meant that the currency-issuing state was no longer capable of maintaining full employment through appropriate use of fiscal policies. The tenet we are entertaining is that the state never went away, it was just co-opted by capital to serve its interests. This will be a two-part blog and centres on a critical period in economic history in the mid-1970s, which marked the break with the full employment system which had moderated the excesses of capitalism. This was the period when the neo-liberal period dawned, and which steadily, opened the way for these excesses to reemerge, in all their indecent indulgence and destruction. It is also the period in which a series of economic myths crystallised into the mainstream narrative we know today, which opposes government deficits and allows unemployment to remain elevated at excessive levels. It is really important to understand what went on then because we are living with the legacy of the falsehoods introduced during this period.

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The co-option of government by transnational organisations

Today, some more analysis of the debate about globalisation and the capacities of the nation-state. We consider the debates in the early 1970s about the power of transnational corporations and the claims that they undermined the capacity of the nation-state to further the interests of the population. On the one hand, the free-market liberals claimed that the emergence of the transnational corporation was a move towards increased global efficiency and the nation-state, which served narrower interests, would be swept aside, along with its regulative structures, by this trend. Global welfare (and solutions to international poverty) would be maximised by the demolition of national borders by transnational capitalism. This view considered the nation-state to be ‘dispensable’ – that it only served narrow interests and the global organisation of production no longer required national governments to operate in this way. The Marxist position was, understandably, at odds with this view. It considered the nation-state to be indispensable to the growing needs of international capital. This was in the sense that governments could provide essential stability to reduce the risk of transnational operations. My position is more in line with the latter view although it clearly recognises the relevance (and power) of the national governments in which they choose to operate. Further, these transnational corporations are typically very large firms within the nations they operate. it is hard to differentiate the political clout that being large exerted from the influence of being global. Certainly, the early literature was not clear on that issue.

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Globalisation and currency arrangements

In today’s blog, I continue the discussion that I started last Thursday, and, specifically, focus on the critique that commentators have made about the loss of state control of their economies as a result of globalisation. The thesis advanced by many analysts is that globalisation has reduced the capacity of the nation-state and forced governments to adopt free market policies at the microeconomic level and austerity at the macroeconomic level, for fear that capital flight will destroy their economies. It is a neatly packaged thesis that the political Left has imbibed, and, in doing so, has undermined the progressive basis of these institutions and left voters with little choice between right-wing parties and the social democratic parties who formally represented the interests of workers and acted as mediators in the class conflict between labour and capital. The major distinguishing feature these days between these two types of parties, who were previously poles apart in approach and mandate sought, is that the so-called progressive side of politics now claims it will implement austerity in a fairer way. These austerity-lite parties, buying into the myth that globalisation has undermined the capacity of the state to pursue full employment policies with equitable income distribution, do not challenge the basis of austerity, but just quibble over who should pay for it. The aim of this research which will appear in my next book (with co-author Thomas Fazi) is to outline a manifesto by which progressive activists and political movements can claim back the space the current generation of sham progressives have ceded to the neo-liberals.

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The mass consumption era and the rise of neo-liberalism

I was having a talk with a friend in San Francisco last Monday about globalisation and the capacity of the state, which is the topic of the upcoming book I am working on (manuscript due around May 2015). He made the comment that globalisation had meant that the state can now only do bad and can no longer do good. I asked him whether he was talking about globalisation (the international nature of finance and supply chains) or neo-liberalism (free market economics) and he said “neo-liberalism is a disease – that is the problem and since the 1970s it has meant the state is restricted to doing bad”. The point I was digging at was that progressives often conflates the two concepts which then leads to flawed conclusions about what the state can and cannot do. Further, when he talked about the state doing bad he was really talking about the impact on the average person and those who are disadvantaged. He wasn’t talking about the so-called top-end-of-town, which have without any question done very well since the 1970s. And that is my next point – the state hasn’t gone way or been rendered impotent by neo-liberalism as many on the Left believe and angst over. As the currency issuer it is still very powerful. It just serves the interests of a different cohort now relative to the cohort it served during the full employment period that followed the Second World War. In doing so, it has shifted from being a mediator of class conflict to serving the interests of capital in its battle to appropriate ever increasing shares of real income from labour. That is a wholly different narrative to the one that emerges when globalisation is conflated with neo-liberalism – as if they are parts of the same process.

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On the trail of inflation and the fears of the same …

Today I’ve been following a document trail concerning the French government decision to adopt the so-called Barre Plan in 1976. This is part of the research on doing for my next book on why the Left abandoned progressive economic strategies and became what we now think of as austerity-lite merchants. I am hoping the manuscript will be finished by April 2016 and the book will emerge a bit later in the year. while the approach that will be taking is emerging, the strategy is to pinpoint key events in history where significant economic policy changes occurred and to analyse the rationale that was used to defend those policy shifts and to assess whether the circumstances that applied at those points in time provide any guidance to current day challenges. One of the big events that lead to deep uncertainty among Social Democratic politicians and their advisers, which arguably, was a key driver in the shift of these parties to the Right, was the Stagflation of the 1970s. The phenomenon of the simultaneous coincidence of accelerating inflation and rising unemployment had not previously been witnessed in the period following the Second World War. It needs a careful analysis because much of the popular understanding of this period and the claims that it demonstrated a failure of Keynesian policy approaches are incorrect and provide no basis for rejecting fiscal intervention to maintain full employment.

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The demise of French greatness and the European Left

The GFC clearly, in my view, demonstrated that the political positions held by both the left- and right-wing governments in the West with respect to economic policy were untenable. Both sides of politics in each major and country adopted versions of market liberalism where the overlap was more dominant than the differences. While the left maintained some emphasis on social policy and the right maintained an emphasis on individual freedom (which was more about corporate freedom than anything), the fact remains that these differences were blurred by the dominance of the free market approach in each of their platforms. It is ironic, that as a consequence of the GFC, the bureaucratic state is more dominant now than it was, especially in the European Union where the political and technical elite interacts with the so-called market to create what has been called the democratic deficit. We now have technocrats in the European bureaucracy, in the IMF, in the World Bank and other multilateral organisations who contrive to implement policies which have allowed the benefits of economic activity to be increasingly diverted to beneficiaries who are at the top end of the income and wealth distribution. Today’s blog continues reporting some of the research I’ve been doing for my next book on the demise of the Left and the subjugation of public purpose in the name of austerity. It seems that we have concentrated on fiscal austerity but the general notion of austerity, which is now the centrepiece of political positions in most advanced countries, goes well beyond just fiscal policy. The response to the recent events in Paris demonstrate how far the state is willing to centralise authoritative controls on the rights of their citizens.

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